DFool has given us the ability to recolor parts of a unit like TColoring, only randomly, but so-far this hasn't really been implemented.

I'd like to suggest that the elves receive this treatment, since the work of TColoring is practically done. Elvish hair is a good candidate for recovering because, it's pretty consistent across the entire race, and the hair-color is never used to differentiate units. I could create the color palettes rather easily. However, then all elven sprites would need to be edited to contain the colors on the palette. That's the hard part, though an obnoxious color like magenta wouldn't need to be used for this. Hopefully art contributors would get behind this.

One the re-coloring of the sprites is complete, it should be trivial for campaign designers to assign a unique hair-color to any elf.

Below is a rough example of the color's i'd use. More options could be easily added, though i think wood-elves should have only light hair-colors.

P.S. Any unit lines that are receiving new art should probably be done with this in mind. Now that i think of it. Mages might be good to start with since most/many of the new frames haven't been made. But only the female's hair shows much.

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Last edited by Eleazar on February 16th, 2007, 1:28 am, edited 2 times in total.

Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.-> What i might be working onAttempting Lucidity

Actually on further examination, the troll line seems to be the place to start.
The mainline units seem to be made from about 7 individual colors. There should be very little sprite editing necessary to make this work.

Here are my ideas for random Troll variation. The one on the left is "normal". On the right, note the rare, and elusive "Mauve Troll", which while ostricized by it's peers, never appears in battle.

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Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.-> What i might be working onAttempting Lucidity

Eleazar wrote:DFool has given us the ability to recolor parts of a unit like TColoring, only randomly, but so-far this hasn't really been implemented.

I'd like to suggest that the elves receive this treatment, since the work of TColoring is practically done. Elvish hair is a good candidate for recovering because, it's pretty consistent across the entire race, and the hair-color is never used to differentiate units. I could create the color palettes rather easily. However, then all elven sprites would need to be edited to contain the colors on the palette. That's the hard part, though an obnoxious color like magenta wouldn't need to be used for this. Hopefully art contributors would get behind this.

One the re-coloring of the sprites is complete, it should be trivial for campaign designers to assign a unique hair-color to any elf.

I generally support this, although I'd want to be really careful about assigning colors, and doing the editing. As far as implementation, I'd want to keep their existing hair color the same, and make sure that none of the existing hair colors get used anywhere on the sprite except in the hair (there's significant overlap between hair and skin palettes on some sprites). Then we'd use the existing palette of colors for the hair as the shifted set.

I'm not going to personally put any weight behind this until I'm done with the existing TC project, except for simultaneous cases; e.g. mermen/maid's hair, and any interesting bits on a drake that would benefit from this. Naga might have a touch of this for their scales.

Eleazar wrote:Below is a rough example of the color's i'd use. More options could be easily added, though i think wood-elves should have only light hair-colors.

I'll take that as a rough example. I really don't like some of these colors (although the silver is fairly cool).

Eleazar wrote:P.S. Any unit lines that are receiving new art should probably be done with this in mind. Now that i think of it. Mages might be good to start with since most/many of the new frames haven't been made. But only the female's hair shows much.

Yeah; will do. The same will go for any reworks of existing units, such as the orcish crossbowman/slurbow.

Eleazar wrote:Actually on further examination, the troll line seems to be the place to start.
The mainline units seem to be made from about 7 individual colors. There should be very little sprite editing necessary to make this work.

*nods* Woses also have relatively few colors, although I shudder to think how many colors might be in their death frames.

Eleazar wrote:Here are my ideas for random Troll variation. The one on the left is "normal". On the right, note the rare, and elusive "Mauve Troll", which while ostricized by it's peers, never appears in battle.

These should all be far, far more subtle. These are not different teams, and right now, these changes are so bold that they nearly look to be on different teams. (I'm ignoring our friend on the far right, of course).

I am perfectly aware of the RC function, but at least Darth Fool's opening post in that thread (and nothing I've read about this since then) doesn't really suggest that I can RC the hair of a single unit in a way that includes the animations.

The only way I can think of is to create [variation]s of every unit that you want to be able to have RC'd hair, one [variation] per colour variation. And that would just be extremely silly, messy and annoying to maintain, IMHO.

I am perfectly aware of the RC function, but at least Darth Fool's opening post in that thread (and nothing I've read about this since then) doesn't really suggest that I can RC the hair of a single unit in a way that includes the animations.

Well, it's possible, there's already an example in trunk.
Run "wesnoth -t" and the scenario-test starts, in which you can bleach the hair of the thief. The color stays throughout the animations.

Feel free to PM me if you start a new terrain oriented thread. It's easy for me to miss them among all the other art threads.-> What i might be working onAttempting Lucidity

Eleazar wrote:Well, it's possible, there's already an example in trunk.
Run "wesnoth -t" and the scenario-test starts, in which you can bleach the hair of the thief. The color stays throughout the animations.

Ok. Interesting, and rather fancy. I suppose the engine will automatically add any image path functions used on the base frame to all the unit's animations, too? I can't test it yet myself, but I'll take your word for it.

Eleazar wrote:Well, it's possible, there's already an example in trunk.
Run "wesnoth -t" and the scenario-test starts, in which you can bleach the hair of the thief. The color stays throughout the animations.

Ok. Interesting, and rather fancy. I suppose the engine will automatically add any image path functions used on the base frame to all the unit's animations, too? I can't test it yet myself, but I'll take your word for it.

The way this work is that there is a new [effect] that can be used to add any image path function(or functions) that will be applied to all images of that unit. It is possible in the unit definition to add image path functions to the individual frames, even the base frame, and these will be applied only as explicitly included. Combined with Boucman's animation filtering options, this allows some pretty powerful things to be done, with the potential for even more if we add in new image path functions. The [effect] image path functions are applied last, although all recolering is done in one fell swoop.

Darth Fool wrote:The way this work is that there is a new [effect] that can be used to add any image path function(or functions) that will be applied to all images of that unit.

Right, I should have remembered that.

On another note, however, I'd say that if doing these flashy things would raise resource consumption, like memory usage, by more than ~10%, I'd say it's not worth it. I suppose OpenGL would help quite a bit with these kind of things too, so it might not be a problem at all.

Also worth noting is the fact that this makes producing for example animations more work, since you'll have to make sure you're not using the wrong colours on wrong parts of the unit. Having the special colour palettes available in separate images might help it a bit.